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Wednesday, August 26, 2015

I left the movie theater heavy-hearted after viewing Straight Out of Compton. I allowed the
positive buzz around the movie to suck me into seeing it even though I’ve never
been a fan of NWA. While I loved Public Enemy, NWA was a bit over the top for
me. I didn’t then and still don’t like music with explicitly sexual and/or violent
lyrics. Words are things. Words matter. So, I’m mindful of the words that fill
my head. I detest music that refers to women as bitches and hoes, and NWA
lyrics are full of such references. I cringed as I sat in the theater listening
to some of their infamous songs about life in the hood.

So, why did I want to see Straight Out of Compton? I was curious: Who was NWA? I wanted to
know their story. I wanted to get an inside look at the men behind the music. I’m
not the same person I used to be, and I wanted to see if they were different
than I thought them to be. I went seeking understanding; I went looking for
redemption. I wanted to be sympathetic to their plight as young Black men in
urban America; I wasn’t.

There’s a scene in the movie Doubt where the nun, played by Meryl Streep speaks with the mother
of a student at the school who the nun suspects is being molested by the
priest. Streep’s character wants the mother to say something. But the mother,
brilliantly played by Viola Davis, refuses. The mother wants to keep her son
free from the wrath of her husband who rejects his son’s perceived sexuality.
Never in my life did I think that I would be ok with not revealing the identity
of a suspected child molester! But she made understand why she was willing to
look the other way if her son was being molested if she thought it would save
his life.

In Nathan McCall’s book, Makes Me Wanna Holla, there is a chapter called Trains that is very difficult to read,
but so insightful into the psyche of some young men. McCall explains how the
young men in the hood looked up to the old heads, and how the old heads were
disrespectful of women. The chapter explains how the boys would trick girls
into compromising situations and gang rape (run a train) them. Later in the
chapter, McCall goes into detail about having a girlfriend and taking her to a
friend’s house for sex, but learns that his boys have set her up for a train.
He ends up getting into a fight trying to defend her honor. But a couple of the
guys take the girl to another apartment to finish what they started. McCall
does an excellent job of demonstrating the warped view many men held of manhood
and the roles of women and girls in their lives. He also shows a maturity that
I found lacking in characters in Straight
Out of Compton.

It has been said that members of NWA were revolutionaries,
but there was nothing revolutionary about their music or about their movie. It
was a bio pic—based on real life events, and they had the right to tell the
story that they wanted to tell. And they did. The only one who was really “about
that life” was Eazy-E. Both Ice Cube and Dr. Dre came from stable home
environments. It was a well-cast film that left me cold. I couldn’t wrap my
head around glorifying what I saw as a destructive force in the Black
community. Every time a movie about slavery or the civil rights movement comes
out, there’s a chorus of Black folk complaining that we keep telling the same
stories of victimization. Well, we’ve seen this story a thousand times as
well.I didn’t find anything revelatory
in the nearly 2 ½ hours that I sat and watched. Here are five sad truths that I gleaned from Straight Out of Compton.

1.We’re still oppressed—some of us more than
others. I was disappointed in how easily Eazy-E fell for the okey-doke. He
allowed their manager Jerry to swindle not only the group out of money, but
Eazy was also taken advantage of because he trusted this White man that he
didn’t know, to do right by him. Even after Ice-Cube and Dr. Dre tried to tell
him, Eazy still believed in Jerry. Yea, even the so-called hard-core members of
keeping-it-real, fuck-the-police NWA were still looking for a White Savior.

2.Consumption and greed continues to be our
downfall. As soon as the money started rolling in, so did the wild parties,
the drugs and the excess of material goods. There was never any mention in the
movie of them giving any money back to the community or doing any type of charity
work. It was all about how much they could get and spend. Though Dr. Dre and
Ice Cube managed to escape the downward spiral that so many of our athletes and
entertainers succumb to, Eazy Ended up being a casualty of never having enough.

3.Colorism is alive and well. Not only
did the members of NWA end up with light-skinned women as partners in real
life, there was a color caste system used to hire girls for the movie. When the
casting call went out, the request was for girls who were classified as A’s B’s,
C’s and D’s with the brighter complexions and straighter hair being A’s and B’s,
brown girls with weaves were C’s, and dark skinned, poor girls were D’s. I can’t
make this up! Here’s a link to the story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/straight-out-of-compton-casting-call_n_5597010.html
And this is what we saw play out on the screen. Most of the women in the movie
were light skinned. Early in the film, Eazy E was the only one who had a
brown-skinned woman, but she was also “upgraded” for a lighter model. Some of
the “blackest” men we know adhered to a Eurocentric model of beauty. Kathleen
Cleaver, member of the Black Panther Party and wife of fellow Panther, Eldridge
Cleaver spoke of being told to go inside during times of conflict so as not to
mess up her pretty light face.

4.Misogyny was and still is an issue. NWA
objectified women. They were boys with toys to be discarded at will. Though they
come off as decent guys in the movie, their lyrics and their lifestyles show
their disdain for women. Ice Cube married his girl and they’re still together.
It’s inferred that Dr. Dre’s desire to pursue a relationship with a woman who
didn’t want drama was partly why he left Death Row Records. And Eazy-E was also
married in the film, but their references to women as bitches as hoes seemed to
also reflect how they felt about women. An abuser doesn’t call his woman honey
or babe before he hits her; she’s probably a bitch, or a hoe. Maybe that
explains Dr. Dre’s abusive past and Ice Cube’s recent interview with Rolling
Out in which he reinerates why some women are bitches and hoes, and only women
who fit into those categories should be concerned. When Dr. Dre brutally
attacked journalist Dee Barnes, members of NWA thought she got what she
deserved. It was only with the release of Straight Out of Compton that Dr. Dre
saw the need to apologize for his past transgressions.

5.Hypocrisy at its best. NWA may have
made music that was raunchy and edgy, but at the end of the day, they were
entertainers shuckin’ and jivin’ for the master. Their gangster rap wasn’t for
the people in communities like Compton; it was for the masturbating voyeurs in
the suburbs who played out the racist fantasies of hood life in their minds.
NWA exploited what was happening in urban America for material gain. These are
the sad truths straight out of the book of conformity and status quo.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

My early childhood was spent on the segregated west side of
Chicago—Jackson and Leavitt before gentrification. It is the near west side now because of its
integrated population unburdened by its former ghetto association with the
blighted areas of the real west side.
It was a magical time in my life. Unencumbered by race because I interacted
primarily with other Black people, I didn’t know racial prejudice. The only other
race of people I came in contact with were White. They were the teachers and
administrators at my school, and the old couple who lived next door, but their
Whiteness was overshadowed by their age. I was more concerned with the fact
that they seemed really old than I was that they were a different race.

I come from a proud family. And my mother was definitely a
no-nonsense woman who commanded respect. We were taught to be respectful, but
not to kow-tow to anyone. I was a sensitive child (which sometimes carries over
into my adult life), so it was important for people to like me. I have
painfully learned the hard way that it’s fine to be liked, but it’s better to
be respected. I live the by the saying: You
teach people how to treat you.

The summer I was nine and my niece Rhonda was seven, my
oldest sister, Julia (Rhonda’s mother) wanted to broaden our horizon by
enrolling us in a summer day camp program. Opposed to the idea from the
beginning, I was content to run up and down the street playing Tag, It, Rock Teacher, Hide- and-Go Seek
and other childhood games with my friends on the block. My sister had paid for
us to go, so off we were shipped to Day Camp.

It was a life-changing experience that brought me
face-to-face with the ugliness of racial prejudice. The first blow was that
Rhonda and I were separated for most of the day because we were in two
different age groups. Our groups were also gender-based. Did I mention that we
were the only two specks of pepper in a sea of salt? Later in the summer two
other Black kids—a brother and sister joined the camp. At least Rhonda had a
Black counselor; her name was Phyllis. Me? I was doing the best I could to keep
from drowning in cultural supremacy.

My counselor was a wimpy, White woman named Terry. The girls
in my group were such mean brats that they made Terry cry every day. When she stopped crying long enough to lead us in some
activities, it was disastrous for me. If it was Duck, Duck Goose, I waited patiently as the girls went around
touching everyone’s head, duck, duck,
duck. . . goose. I was never tapped. When it was Red Rover, I never heard, Red
Rover, Red Rover send Stephanie on over. I managed to get through the
mornings because I knew that after lunch all of the groups came together and I
could escape the Mean Girls and find my way back to my niece and a sense of knowing.

I liked to braid hair, and Terry liked her hair braided. So,
sometimes she’d let me braid her hair. The other girls liked to play in her
hair because it was really long, but I was the only one who knew how to braid
hair. I eventually adjusted to life at camp, and I actually thought things were
getting better, but I was wrong. The Mean Girls had simply taken a couple of
days off. One day, one of the girls in my group had some Skittles. I liked Starbursts;
I had never seen Skittles and I
wanted to taste the rainbow. “You want some?” she offered. But before she gave
me the candy, she smashed it up first. She handed it to me, and I took it,
tasted it and felt like someone punched me in my stomach. I chewed on the
bitterness of the rainbow of racial prejudice.

It was a long time before I ate Skittles again, and a long time before I forgave myself. To this
day, I don’t know why I didn’t throw that candy back in her face or simply
decline. That people-pleasing little girl is gone. She’s been replaced by a woman
who loves rainbows because she knows that a rainbow is not a rainbow without
its variety of hues. It is the colors of the rainbow that makes it beautiful.
And the bitterness of the rainbow that I tasted as a child has shown me that
life is so much sweeter now that I know my worth.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”The Golden Rule states that we should treat
people the way we want to be treated, and though that seems easy enough, it
doesn’t always happen. In a perfect world, we would all treat each other with
dignity, respect, kindness and consideration, but in the world we have to deal
with imperfect people not only in our daily interactions, but also in the
workplace.We can all identify colleagues
who make can make the hair on our neck stand on end with their antics, but the
funny thing nobody knows that they’re driving everyone in the office down the
high of no return with some of their antics. Do you recognize any of these
people from your workplace?

First up is Talking Ted. He never shuts up. No matter what
the subject matter is, he has opinion, and not matter who’s talking, Ted is
talking, too. He suffers from verbal diarrhea because he mouth never stops
running, and when you see him you want to run and hand him a bottle of Keopectate
to see if that can help.

Next is Fidgety Fiona. She’s the tapper—pencil, pen, tips of
her nails. She’s also a shaker. Sitting next to her in a meeting is like
sitting next to vibrator. She can’t stop moving and as much as you’d like to
shake her to make her sit still, you know that it won’t like and she’ll
probably like it!

Messy Marvin thinks he has a personal maid or butler, but he
thinks he does. He’s the one who takes advantage of the free coffee in the
morning, adding cream and sugar, but leaving empty sugar packets, granules, and
cream ups in his wake. Cleaning up behind himself is akin to sin.

Negative Ned never has anything good to say. Makes you want
to shoot yourself with a water gun and take yourself out of the misery of his
company. When you see him coming you just want to stick your fingers in your
ears, close your eyes and just make stupid noises to drown out his negative
commentary.

Let’s face it; we don’t always love the people we work for,
or the things that they make us do, so the last thing we want to do is hear
from Rah Rah Reese is the company cheerleader. No matter how ridiculous
something sounds, it all sounds good to Rah Rah Reese. Rah Rah Reese is such a
suck-up that every time you see him, you just want to hand him a pack of
straws.

The workplace is a very interesting place with a cast of
colorful characters. Do you see any of your co-workers or maybe you see
yourself? Which member of the cast do you most hate or relate to?